In which the blog's author sets about to administer a corrective treatise on journalistic misapprehension of China's true situation

From Roland Soong's blog, I find an article by Reuters in which Soong is quoted about China users protecting their identities while surfing the Net behind the Great Firewall.

The article says that China's Net censorship is top-down.

In which the blog's author gets a little bit snitty and picky!

I don't normally like to nitpick, but this is not actually always true. Yes, technically, there are government departments responsible for setting standards and regulations that govern what content is or is not allowable on the Net. But how do you suppose a Government that is hierarchical, fraying at the edges, concerned about power manipulation by cadres and lower ensigns of the CCP can effectively manage to police the Net and stay in control?

That's like attending to three baseball games on three televisions, washing the baby, picking your toenails and washing the dishes at the same time while your pot of beans boils over.

Likely, what really happens is that the monitoring and policing of the Net is bottom to top.

In which the blog's author discusses candidly his thoughts about Web control giving slight poetic interpretation of the way in which the communist party actually works in monitoring the Web

Provincial and municipal leaders, and lower, as in regular citizens and the Web companies themselves, monitor and police themselves. These lower officials and "lowly" grassroots Web cleaners are left to their own devices to determine what is acceptable, sensitive or not.

Just refer to the dozens or so cases every month where blogs are blocked or where Web companies have to apologize for content or what-nots.

In one case, a "civil body" called the China Internet Counseling Conference told video Web portals UUSEE.com and zol.com.cn, an arm of CNET Networks, to publicly apologize for having indecent material on their Web sites.

That corrective self-policing does not seem like a top-down censorship and control issue. That came from the bottom, or it must have come from the middle, because apparently the people in that forum are made up of members of Web companies, though the exact names of the people on this board are unconfirmed.

In which the blog's author winds up this post with a quote from an Irish poet who is now dead

I think it is convenient for journalists to say that censorship is top-down because they are thinking with a kind of false conception of how the party actually functions, if it does function at all in some cases.

Usually, those proclamations that you read about in the press about Web standards and cleaning up news posts on blogs and bulletin boards are happening because something is being noticed on the lower levels first. The ironic thing here is that since micro actions by bloggers and citizen journalists are provoking the top to administer justice or Web standards in a completely reactionary way, it must tell you one thing. The people at the top don't know what's going on!

Forgive me for saying this, but: China people, you have the upper hand! Blogging has given China a completely new way to administer social justice. If censorship and control are really top-down and authoritarian, let me just say that the Internet would be closed! Shut down! Not used!

This isn't Burma.

China's political situation is more like the somewhat enigmatic widening gyre mentioned in Yeats' famous poem, The Second Coming, which I will link to here and then quote from below.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W.B. Yeats

 

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